The Umbrella of U.S. Power

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions of U.S. Policy

Chomsky observes the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a "Path to a Better World," while chronicling how far off the trail the United States is with respect to actual political practice and conduct. Analyzing the contradictions of U.S. power while illustrating the real progress won by sustained popular struggle, Chomsky cuts through official political rhetoric to examine how the United States not only violates the UD, but at times uses it as a weapon to wield against designated enemies.

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Happy Birthday to our dear friend, Noam Chomsky! It’s hard to know what to say to someone as esteemed and cherished as Chomsky, so we’ll keep it simple and wish him many more years of offering a voice of sanity and conscience in an increasingly insane, unsconscionable world. All the best to you, Noam!

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, NOAM CHOMSKY is known throughout the world for his political writings, activism, and for for his groundbreaking work in linguistics. A professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, Chomsky gained recognition in academic circles for his theory of transformational grammar, which drew attention to the syntactic universality of all human languages. But it is as a critic of unending war, corporate control, and neoliberalism that Chomsky has become one of the country’s most well known public intellectuals. The 1969 publication of American Power and the New Mandarins marked the beginning of Chomsky’s rigorous public criticism of American hegemony and its lieges. Since then, with his tireless scholarship and an unflagging sense of moral responsibility, he has become one of the most influential writers in the world. Chomsky is the author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward S. Herman), Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, and over one hundred other books. To this day Noam Chomsky remains an active and uncompromising voice of dissent.